I agree 100%, reddit is heavily manipulated - but a minor stake in a $2+ billion company doesn't change who's running the show. Reddit is still a US company, operating on US soil, and its management and top-admins and hw and servers are all at the physical mercy of only one government - and it's not the Chinese.

Then just hrs after the investment was announced some admins "admit" they censor content to please their new Chinese overlords - I just can't bring myself to believe it. Seems crazy that the old media-manipulation machinery would roll over that easily.

However, if I was a professional perception-controller (with n ntrepid licenses) and I wanted to spook a western audience about the great new menace of China - I would do just that... make fake claims about "them taking over" to trigger a standard "were not gonna let them!" reaction.

That's just my random thoughts. There are so many layers of deception on reddit that I take nothing there at face value.

weird, not a single mention of the 2002 coup anywhere, which was so very similar.

Top question if the US media was free and actually did their job: How much did the "National Endowment for Democracy" pay up this time? In 2002 they brazenly backed the military coup with millions, despite valid & democratic elections.